A group of developers has found a way to protect the Bitcoin network from potential threats posed by quantum computers. Casa CTO Jameson Lopp published a proposal on GitHub.

“Quantum attackers could compute private keys for known public addresses and then slowly move funds to avoid drawing attention from the crypto community. It’s likely that we would learn about the day of the quantum breach much later—unless the attackers intentionally broadcast the transactions,” he noted.

The core idea of the initiative is to migrate users of the digital gold to quantum-resistant addresses, while freezing all legacy ones. The frozen funds would be recoverable. According to the developers, this would require the creation of a separate Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP).

They referenced BIP 360, developed by Anduro protocol senior engineer known as Hunter Beast. This hard fork proposes the introduction of a new address type that uses post-quantum cryptography.

According to Deloitte analysts, 25% of all bitcoins are vulnerable to quantum attacks. This includes 1 million BTC belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto.

“Bitcoin’s cryptographic foundations have never faced such an existential threat. A successful quantum attack on Bitcoin would lead to significant economic disruption and damage to the entire ecosystem,” the report states.

As a reminder, in March Lopp proposed burning quantum-vulnerable bitcoins. The Casa CTO said that recovering access to lost assets contradicts the core principles of digital gold: censorship resistance, immutability of transactions, and conservatism.

Earlier, researchers from Chaincode Labs also assessed the threat quantum computers pose to the Bitcoin network.